As she said this, Nellie turned pale, her eyes flashed, her heart began beating so violently that she sank back on the pillow, and for two minutes she could not utter a word.
“Call them, Vanya,” she said at last in a faint voice. “I want to say goodbye to them all. Goodbye, Vanya!”
She embraced me warmly for the last time. All the others came in. Nikolay Sergeyitch could not realize that she was dying; he could not admit the idea. Up to the last moment he refused to agree with us, maintaining that she would certainly get well. He was quite thin with anxiety; he sat by Nellie’s bedside for days and even nights together. The last night he didn’t sleep at all. He tried to anticipate Nellie’s slightest wishes, and wept bitterly when he came out to us from her, but he soon began hoping again that she would soon get well. He filled her room with flowers. Once he bought her a great bunch of exquisite white and red roses; he went a long way to get them and bring them to his little Nellie… He excited her very much by all this. She could not help responding with her whole heart to the love that surrounded her on all sides. That evening, the evening of her goodbye to us, the old man could not bring himself to say goodbye to her for ever. Nellie smiled at him, and all the evening tried to seem cheerful; she joked with him and even laughed…. We left her room, feeling almost hopeful, but next day she could not speak. And two days later she died.
I remember how the old man decked her little coffin with flowers, and gazed in despair at her wasted little face, smiling in death, and at her hands crossed on her breast. He wept over her as though she had been his own child. Natasha and all of us tried to comfort him, but nothing could comfort him, and he was seriously ill after her funeral.
Anna Andreyevna herself gave me the little bag off Nellie’s neck. In it was her mother’s letter to Prince Valkovsky. I read it on the day of Nellie’s death. She cursed the prince, said she could not forgive him, described all the latter part of her life, all the horrors to which she was leaving Nellie, and besought him to do something for the child.
“She is yours,” she wrote. “She is your daughter, and you know that she is really your daughter, I have told her to go to you when I am dead and to give you this letter. If you do not repulse Nellie, perhaps then I shall forgive you, and at the judgement day I will stand before the throne of God and pray for your sins to be forgiven. Nellie knows what is in this letter. I have read it to her, I have told her all; she knows everything, everything.
But Nellie had not done her mother’s bidding. She knew all, but she had not gone to the prince, and had died unforgiving.
When we returned from Nellie’s funeral, Natasha and I went out into the garden. It was a hot, sunny day. A week later they were to set off. Natasha turned a long, strange look upon me.
“Vanya,” she said, “Vanya, it was a dream, you know.”
“What was a dream?” I asked.
“All, all,” she answered, “everything, all this year. Vanya, why did I destroy your happiness?”
And in her eyes I read:
“We might have been happy together for ever.”
THE END
The House of the Dead
CHAPTER I. TEN YEARS A CONVICT
CHAPTER III. FIRST IMPRESSIONS
CHAPTER IV. FIRST IMPRESSIONS (continued).
CHAPTER V. FIRST IMPRESSIONS (continued)
CHAPTER VII. THE FIRST MONTH (continued)
CHAPTER VIII. NEW ACQUAINTANCES—PETROFF
CHAPTER IX. MEN OF DETERMINATION—LUKA
CHAPTER X. ISAIAH FOMITCH—THE BATH—BAKLOUCHIN.
CHAPTER XI. THE CHRISTMAS HOLIDAYS
CHAPTER II. THE HOSPITAL (continued).
CHAPTER III. THE HOSPITAL (continued).
CHAPTER IV. THE HUSBAND OF AKOULKA
CHAPTER VI. THE ANIMALS AT THE CONVICT ESTABLISHMENT
PART I.
CHAPTER I. TEN YEARS A CONVICT
In the midst of the steppes, of the mountains, of the impenetrable forests of the desert regions of Siberia, one meets from time to time with little towns of a thousand or two inhabitants, built entirely of wood, very ugly, with two churches—one in the centre of the town,